Lyric Personhood

On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West

Dan Wang

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English

University of Chicago Press
19 November 2025

Theory of music & musicology

Series: Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance

A new theory of personhood makes the case that a ""person"" has always been an aesthetic category, not just a legal, political, or moral one.

What does it mean to be a person? One might think of the possession of certain rights, having the capacity for love, or being self-determined. But if words like ""person"" or ""love"" seem to carry an internal meaning, where does this meaningfulness come from? Lyric Personhood contends that to be encultured in the modern West is to learn, on top of everything else, an unspoken and mostly felt sense of what it means to be someone, a sense transmitted not only in language but also through encounters with aesthetic form. Through close readings that span nineteenth-century European opera, commercial cinema, and amateur YouTube proposal videos, Dan Wang shows that a ""person"" has become an aesthetic concept—and not just a legal, moral, political, or philosophical one—in the last two hundred years of Western culture.

It's hard to let go of the organizing promise of romantic love, the dream of therapeutic ""health,"" and the aspiration to belong to national culture, Wang argues, because these longings have been shaped by an archive of sentimental and melodramatic works that trains people's expectations for life, genre, and even the knowing promised in theory itself. Tracing a surprisingly continuous imagination of personhood through opera and film aesthetics, Lyric Personhood introduces modes of reading audiovisual works that allow a longer story to be told about the forms that make personhood sensible in the West.

By: Dan Wang
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780226843551
ISBN 10: 0226843556
Series: Opera Lab: Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 19 November 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction. Self-Evident One. Three Speeches Delivered by Colin Firth Two. White Love: Romantic Comedy, the ’90s, and Genre in the Background Three Punch Lines (What’s Comedy Doing in Romantic Comedy?) Musical Montage, or Heterosexual Aesthetics Revelations of Form: A Reading of You’ve Got Mail Three. Metarhythms of the Addict: Tannhäuser in the Compulsion Archive Get Better Two Concepts of Tragedy Addiction and the Event of Thought Silence and World Coda: Audiovisual Aesthetics and the Problem of the Whole Four. The Soundtrack Is So Cliché: Ambient Westernness After 9/11 Zooming Out, Fading In USA, the Backstage Musical: The West Wing Event Without Content: The Happening Personhood and the Cliché: Non-Stop Race After the “Postracial” Terrorist Film Hold Music, General Forms, and the Lyric Ordinary: Kajillionaire Epilogue. Where Nothing Happens Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Dan Wang is assistant professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh. He has contributed articles to The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and to the journal 19th-Century Music.

Reviews for Lyric Personhood: On the Aesthetics of Being Someone in the West

“By turns powerful and moving, Lyric Personhood is a profoundly original study of the impact of audiovisual storytelling on identity. This is not just a book about film, opera, or music in screen media; true to its title, this is a book about the role of audiovisual forms in the formation of the self. With satisfying attention to detail, Wang generously unfolds figurations of personhood (the addict, the lover) and situates them in a cultural and historical fabric. Opera, film, and music scholars will read it with interest and pleasure, but it joins the select company of books whose reach is much wider.” * Christopher Morris, Maynooth University * “What if our ideas about personhood are created by music and movies as much as by morality and the law? Wang argues that the category of the ‘person’ is experienced affectively and aesthetically. Lyric Personhood shows how we learn what it feels like to be a person, from Wagner’s operas to post-9/11 melodramas, from speeches in romantic comedies to the music in avant-garde films. Inventive, surprising, and beautifully written, this is a groundbreaking new work.” * Elisabeth Anker, George Washington University *